Americans produce a large amount of trash. Recent studies by the Environmental Protection Agency estimate that each person in America produces an average of 4.5 pounds of solid waste trash every single day, equating to over a billion collective pounds of trash in the country. This staggering amount of trash is an environmental issue, and efforts to reduce, reuse, and recycle are vitally important to maintaining the quality of our environment.
While some of the trash produced is degradable or compostable, much of the trash is not readily biodegradable or photodegradable, and as such, can persist for thousands of years before it has degraded or decomposed. One particular scourge is the plastic bag. Plastic bags are extremely thin bags, frequently made from polyethylene, often distributed by stores to customers to carry purchases home. The bags are generally intended to be single-use; when the customer arrives home, he or she will remove the purchased items from the bag and then throw the bag away.
Most bags distributed at grocery stores are plastic bags, generally known as grocery bags, or also as t-shirt bags because of their similar appearance to an A-shirt or sleeveless undershirt. Grocers provide these bags to their shoppers to carry purchased groceries home. Grocers are generous with their bags: meats are placed in separate bags from other items, cold items are double bagged, sometimes a separate bag will be used as a handle to carry the other bags. These bags are useful for carrying and containing the groceries on the trip home. Once home, their usefulness generally ends. Most shoppers discard the bags. A small number of municipalities providing recycling for grocery bags, leaving shoppers with the choice of either discarding the bags or storing them for mass recycling with a private organization. Estimates range from between one to five percent of grocery bags are recycled.
When viewed against the relatively short useful life of these single-use plastic bags, there is a tremendous energy cost in manufacturing and shipping a bag, and there is a huge environmental impact. The United States uses approximately one hundred billion plastic bags each year and discards approximately three million tons of plastic bags. Plastic bags rank as the second most common form of trash after cigarette butts, and the United Nations has estimated that each square mile of the ocean contains about 46,000 pieces of floating plastic. Over one million marine birds and animals die each year from ingestion of plastic bags.
Solutions to the plastic bag problem are needed. Increasing the number of ways a person can reduce, reuse, and recycle a plastic bag would greatly contribute to the preservation of the environment.